Today as I walked to work I was rounding a curve in the road, the railroad tracks fenced in with tall weeds, tall grass and grey sky, my favorite. A flock of blackbirds took flight in front of the scene and surprised me. Something must have spooked them. It was a moment; it was cool, rain from last night in puddles on the ground. Their black bodies flying against the steel grey of the sky, they flew together as though reading each others thoughts. Their reflections cast in the giant puddles, movement above, movement below. Birds can be mysterious. When they first burst out of the tall grass it was noisy but as they rose into the air there was a moment of almost total silence and stillness as though I was looking at a painting. Then time and space corrected itself, I took a deep breath and I walked to work, it was very nice.

When you see a bird feasting on a carcass it inspires quite a different feeling I have but one word for, and that word is, ew. It’s one thing, the majestic eagle soaring high in the sky, beauty and savageness, a wild freedom. But get him on the ground feeding on a kill, an eyeball hanging from his bloodied beak and it’s not so pretty. Sure it’s just nature, it’s the natural order of things. Sometimes you even get the old carrion birds feasting on the nasty bits, leftovers. The old birds often look like they’ve been hit by a truck and lived to tell the story, or came back as zombie birds, for them the eyeball is a nice effect.

There are cute little birds that will perch on your finger and cock their heads at you and there are birds that will call you an asshat for a cracker. I used to feed the seagulls off of my boat in Oyster Point Marina in San Francisco. I would step out with a piece of bread, not a bird in site and all I had to do was gesture as though I was throwing something into the air and BANG! I’d be surrounded by them. They wouldn’t land, just sort of hover, flappity-flapping around trying to catch the next bit I threw. They weren’t cute nor were they terribly gruesome and they shit all over the deck. Still, I figured I was better off being friends with them than enemies.

I arrived at work, my head still in the clouds ruminating on birds and saw my co-coworkers. They were birds too. They weren’t savage like the eagle, mysterious like the raven or cute like like a little chickadee. I came in and they all appeared to me as those cartoon Angry Birds…This might be a very interesting day.